ETERNAL/RETURN
The Alfa & Omega of Ibrahim Junior:
in Conversation with Ibrahim Alfa Jnr
This interview was conducted in two parts. The first half was conducted in Graz, Austria, at the Mille Plateaux Non-ference. We were both staying together as participants/performers at this event, and found a slot to record a dialogue. The first interview cuts off because Claire hadn’t slept properly in several days and had been sitting under a heat lamp during the interview, only to eventually pass out mid-interview. It’s all on the original recording, and one day we will show you all; it’s very funny, and a tad absurd. We conducted the second part of the interview at a distance to compensate for what we didn’t manage to speak about in person. Everything was transcribed from the audio and co-edited afterwards.
Ibrahim has had an unbelievable life, and other interviews hint towards that, but we didn’t want to cover the same topics exactly because, despite the importance of acknowledging the struggles he has passed through, there is more to this incredibly calm, kind hearted, clever and talented musician than his past. Ibrahim is a man of the future, who hangs out in other star systems.
PALAIS SINCLAIRE:
So, Junior, where should we begin?
IBRAHIM ALFA JUNIOR:
Ooh, I will leave that to your imagination I think.
part α
PS:
I think that because of the context, it makes sense to at least begin with the topic that has brought us together here. So, with that in mind, we can start with the very basic question: When did you first hear about Force Inc./Mille Plateaux?
IAJ:
The first time Force Inc. came onto my radar, I was 14 or 15. I was in a record shop in Portsmouth in South England; there were two shops down there, one selling techno as I liked it, and another one mainly selling cheesy rave. I remember that I bought a couple of records from the one that was more underground Techno, and I went to go and get my train home, and as I got to the station, I realised I had more time to wait than I expected, so I went to check out this other shop that was notorious for cheesy rave. I was sure I wouldn’t find anything, but I saw a record with an X-Wing from Star Wars on it, so I thought “wow, that looks interesting”. Pretty much because of the cover, I bought this album, and it turned out to be Generation Star Wars by Alec Empire, and it was an absolute revelation. I had recently bought Selected Ambient Works by Aphex Twin and another one from their alias Polygon Window, but for me, this record from Alec Empire was of a similar standard. What a surprise.
PS:
How old were you then?
IAJ:
Young, like, 14-15.
PS:
It’s funny. At that age it’s understandable to be drawn in to a Star Wars front cover, but perhaps now not many people would expect any serious music or art to feature an X-Wing on it, but then again, you wouldn’t have picked up the record if it didn’t have that cover—Achim pulled a Jedi mind trick on you.
IAJ:
It was a gateway!
PS:
Yeah, it was totally a gateway.
IAJ:
It was just a strange coincidence, because I didn’t know anything about Alec Empire, and being pre-internet still, I couldn’t just go and search for Force Inc. online, but I definitely remember thinking that from now on I would always be on the lookout for anything by Force Inc. or Mille Plateaux. I followed Alec Empire’s stuff for a bit, but the I got Beginning to Understand by Cristian Vogel a few years later, and you know, I was already a fan of Cristian’s stuff, but this record was a confirmation that it wasn’t just a lucky record or two, this Force Inc. label was serious. At the time, Mille Plateaux was releasing stuff in tandem with Force Inc., with Force Inc. being the more dance-oriented side, and Mille Plateaux was more experimental. Yet, Mille Plateaux always seemed to draw my attention the most.
By that time, I think my daughter had just about been born, so we had just moved to Brighton. There, I had made one demo tape, and I wanted to get more copies of it, so I went into a record shop in the town and met this guy called Nick, who asked what kind of music it was, to which I said Techno. He asked me if he could listen to it, and I was worrying that, because I didn’t have any copies of it, if I give it to him to listen, it might get chewed up in the tape deck. Nonetheless, I gave it to him, and once he had listened, he told me about a club night he was running, and said I should come to the night club, and guess what? That night Cristian Vogel was playing. I went up to him and told him how influential that Beginning to Understand EP was for me, and it turned out that he lived opposite me, on the same road. There was also another guy two floors above me, who made some albums for Force Inc. At the time, I was working at a factory, mostly 12-hour shifts, as well as raising a child, so, while the music was important to me, it was happening in the background of all of that. On the other hand, the others like Cristian, were students back then, and so, naturally, they had more time than me, but, really, they were so supportive, and taught me stuff about the Commodore Amiga 500 and so on.
At some point, Cristian told me that he had this record label Mosquito, and that I should release a record there. That label, for lack of a better word, functioned like a feeder for Tresor, and for Force Inc./Mille Plateaux. Every artist who came through Mosquito ended up with either Tresor or Mille Plateaux, or both. I was churning out Techno all the time for all kinds of labels, and doing a lot of various gigs, but it took until maybe 1999, to actually have a discourse with Achim Szepanski himself. Even though my daughter was a peaceful child, it’s very difficult to be able to sit down and think “right, I’m gonna make an album”, when you’re working 12 hours a day and raising a child; it just doesn’t work like that. I had been producing EPs, singles and so on, for a while, but I had never found a chance to really sit and think conceptually about an album, but at some point I did make an EP for Achim, which was named after the Polish word for ‘colourblind’, Daltonista, as I was also gigging in Poland at the time. One side of that EP was quite linear, but the B-side was out-there, and I remember being so happy that Achim completely supported the B-side — other labels wouldn’t allow me to assert my own creativity, but Achim was always saying “no that’s cool, that’s your sound, let’s go with that”. It gave me so much encouragement. I never managed to make an album for him as I couldn’t quite find the time to do justice to the label.
PS:
So, let me just summarise a bit: You were living in Brighton, where you were producing music, as well as touring a lot in Poland?
IAJ:
Yes, as well as Germany, every city you could imagine there.
PS:
You were what, 18-19?
IAJ:
Yeah, it was kind of wild looking back at it, I had no mobile phone obviously, I was with just my hardware in my suitcases.
PS:
So, you were playing “live” from the beginning? What did you take around with you?
IAJ:
An Amiga 500, a Korg Prophecy, an MS2000, a couple of drum machines. A full one-man-band thing. There was a comedy to it, because as my rider, I would request an old TV instead of a monitor, so I’d always be up there on stage with one of those huge analog TVs. At the time, I considered my Amiga 500 to be my main piece of gear, but it was always a bit risky because they were prone to have issues, and you never knew if it was going to work properly once you take it out of the suitcase. One time, in Stuttgart, I had arrived to the city, and the MIDI interface wasn’t working, but by some luck, the guy who owned the club I was going to play in also owned and operated a computer museum. It was so random, but he was able to say “yeah, actually I have an Amiga 500 MIDI interface in the museum, I can bring it to you”.
So yeah, most weekends I was just off to Europe to play live, I was so fortunate.
PS:
But how did you get to that point? One minute you were 14-15 buying that X-Wing Alec Empire record, and four years later you’re booked almost every weekend, all over Europe. Was Cristian Vogel the key?
IAJ:
Well, Mosquito was such a seal of approval, as a brand, that’s for sure. There was a little network; they had a crew that I was associated with, No Future, which had a forum. You know, it was Cristian, Psybeg, Neil Langstrom and Tobias Schmit. The first time I played in Germany, it was also in Stuttgart, in a club called ‘Neue Heimat’. I had an amazing time, and they asked if I want to come back in six months and I said yes, naturally. Then, the next one was in Stammheim, and, again, they asked me to come back. That club had a record label as well, so I started doing EPs for them, and so before I knew it, I had a thing going in Germany.
PS:
Was it common for clubs to have labels then?
IAJ:
Back then it was yeah, if they didn’t have a label, they would possibly have a booking agency or something. Back then, believe it or not, I used to just go on the internet to the yellow pages, find a club anywhere in Europe and just send them an email saying: “Hi, my name is Ibi, you probably haven’t heard any of my records, although you might have done, but hey, I have a live act, do you want to book me?” 9 times out of 10 they said “yeah, let’s give it a go”. I think it may have been easier to get a booking because I was playing live.
PS:
I wanted to ask about that. How many people were playing live back then?
IAJ:
It wasn’t that common, honestly. Though what was odd, at the time, was that we had almost no footprint in England at the time️. We had a club night at some venue in Brighton during the week but other than that, we weren’t known at all. In Germany we were on the cover of magazines, we had loads of press, but every Sunday, I was coming back to England, back to being Dad, and going back to the factory. I’d be selling out a club on a Saturday night, but back at the factory, my boss would just say “yeah well, now you’re cleaning the bins mate”️. It really put things into perspective. I was getting something like 3.72 an hour, and after 8 hours you’d get time and a half, putting it up to around 5 pounds. I had colleagues who had been stuck in that factory for their entire lives, so every time I got to perform, I really had to appreciate that it was an absolute godsend︎. I needed that, I was watching all my pals having fun, going out, but I had a daughter to raise, so beyond just getting paid an extra salary each week from the gig, it was a chance for me to go out and have fun without compromising on my responsibilities.
PS:
Maybe having to take your responsibilities seriously also meant that you could take music seriously, in terms of attitude—you had a drive and a vision, it meant a lot to you.
IAJ:
Yeah, because every second I was making music, I could have been with my daughter, so I had to make those moments worth it. Loads of my EPs were made with my daughter on my lap. When you have a young child, it’s a matter of thinking: if I’m not making the absolute most of the time that I’m not with my daughter, then I’m letting her down. Soon after, there was this distributor that was founded by Regis, a.k.a Karl O’Connor, who worked with The Surgeon—they still do a lot of records together—so at that time I made a record, gave it to a distributor and they came back and asked to do a label with me. I said “what, are you serious? Have they really thought that through?”, but that’s how we started the label Semi Automatic... Once you have a label, you can meet even more people, and it just rolled. But even then, I realised that what I was putting out was far less linear than Techno was becoming.
PS:
I guess that’s where Achim picked up an interest in your music, especially that first B-side. You yourself were something of a response to what he was making a legacy out of working against.
IAJ:
Well, that’s what drew me to Mille Plateaux as well, no compromises. Look, I also felt that the whole free party scene was a bit of a turn-off, because it just seemed like a microcosm of the exact same society that it was claiming to push against.
PS:
That’s like 1999, and already there was a critique of the free party scene as being basically fraudulent?
IAJ:
Yeah, it honestly just seemed like a very pushy personality would install themselves at the top, and from there, it was basically just the same political situation as what it claimed to be rebelling against. Just a microcosm for the things I thought were bad in society. I don’t know, I used to think that being underground was really about those Tuesday mornings where I would be walking to work in the rain at 6:30, on my way to the factory, but I’d be buzzing because of some new record or something. Anyone else would have looked at me and dismissed me as just some drum rat.
PS:
That’s quite schizophrenic. Split between magazine covers in Germany and the factory in England.
IAJ:
Yeah... But as I said, I was happy enough with the arrangement, the free rave scene in the U.K. just seemed to be subversive, rather than actually being subversive. I always felt with Achim and the whole Mille Plateaux crew that they were doing exactly what they claimed to be. Honest and truthful, but with no compromise in the quality; nice artworks, quality releases, everything always handled well. Once I really became aware that this wasn’t just a label putting out great music, but it was a group of people who thought like I did, it was important to me. For example, I sometimes faced a compromise where a club could offer me up to €2000 to play, but only of a certain style. I was always uncomfortable with the idea that you could get paid more for playing music between certain few parameters. I just kept on thinking no, and Mille Plateaux was a beacon for that kind of thinking, to be real about what you’re doing. Even the stuff of theirs that wasn’t my favourite was still leagues above everything else.
PS:
Did you ever actually go and live in Germany?
IAJ:
No, never. A lot of people thought I did, I had that distributor who was based in Germany, and Semi Automatic was actually based in Berlin, but I never lived there. Most of the Mille Plateaux crew were dotted around. It was really strange, living in Brighton but being professionally based in Germany. It was always part of that dream of Berlin though, that cliche of kids wanting to grow up and join the circus, I wanted to run away to Berlin. Seeing pictures in magazines of sci-fi freaks from Detroit next to Eastern European punks meeting through this music, it was amazing. For me growing up, seeing people who looked like me being welcomed into this movement, it was something I was looking for my whole life.
PS:
So, this whole time you were sort of in communication with Achim, but how long after that first 1999 release with Force Inc. did you release with Mille Plateaux again?
IAJ:
The second one didn’t actually happen until September 2022! For some background, as I said, Cristian Vogel’s label Mosquito was a feeder for Tresor and Mille Plateaux and others, and the other guys all did countless albums for Tresor. I played live at Tresor, but when I did manage to put together something of an album for Tresor, they didn’t like it. At all. It was absolutely devastating for me. Luckily, I sent it to R&S and they immediately said yes, they took it instantly and we released it as Forever EP, on the sub-label “Diatomyc”. One of my biggest regrets was that the time given for this album, originally made for Tresor, could have been time spent on making something for Mille Plateaux instead.
At some point, I moved back to Brighton after 10 years of living in London, and I had seen that Mille Plateaux had restarted and I thought I’d finally give it a go. I reached out to Achim and he said yes, but he mentioned that they were only doing albums, and asked if I would be okay with that. I said okay, let’s go then. I sent to him what later became Messier87 and I explained that I’d been using StarWaves, a new sound design app that has been massive for me. It was a kind of unusual request, but I asked if I could do a digital release alongside the vinyl, and so that’s how I made the alias ‘Count.0’. Since then, I’ve done two Count.0 albums️ and two Ibrahim Alfa Junior albums on Mille Plateaux.
part ω
PS:
So, as you said in the interview you did with James Gui which was published through Bandcamp, you’re currently underway with this three-part series you are doing with Mille Plateaux, where you say you will cover 3 distinct phases of Techno. You began with Messier87, where you put together a collection of works that are reminiscent of what you used to “churn-out” on the dance floors of Germany. Next was Sirius A, where you went back into the Detroit, Black Dog and Drexciya period of your youth: “pure techno”. Finally, the third one, yet to come out, is a vision of the future, more hi-tech. That is what I want to get into now, the future. You mentioned in the first part of the interview about the iPad application StarWaves, which I saw you use twice last October, in Graz, first in Forum Stadtpark’s basement club, and then, second, a week later, in Dom im Berg, that cave in the mountain with a 3D Ambisonics system. We both played in both of those line-ups, and that’s why we had a comparatively extended time together, and it was definitely mind-blowing stuff that I saw from you. What, then, is your approach going to be when it comes to writing the 3rd instalment of your trilogy on Mille Plateaux?
IAJ:
The three-album series I am currently doing with Mille Plateaux can be broken down as follows: with Messier87, I found myself creating the entire album using what is called a ‘tracker sequencer’, which is what I predominantly used on the records I was making in my late teens and early 20s, after I had been initiated into this method by Cristian Vogel. I think Mosquito 11 is probably the best example of my own use of this process back then, when I was operating on the Commodore Amiga, running a program called ‘Octamed’. Now, more than twenty-years later, the tracker sequencer I used on my most recent album was obviously really modern in comparison, but it essentially holds true to the same core principles. While I did insist on going back to this workflow—and these trackers are definitely a retro technology—I wasn’t really chasing a retro sound. When I was younger, I was just using these technologies because that’s just what we were doing, and it just happened to become a theme that shaped what I was doing. By the time I was deep into Sirius A, which puts us in 2023, I was tinkering with completely different tech, there seemed to be so much new technology, different sequencers and synthesizers, a lot of which were really novel to me. The production of Sirius A was, for this reason, quirkier than Messier87, as I was feeling around these different technologies.
With Sirius A, I was trying to use modern digital technologies without losing that feeling of being rooted in Detroit Techno which is the main ‘musical influence’—though I wanted to construct slightly different tropes to the more common 130 bpm rhythms. Underground Resistance, Aux88, Drexciya and the music of Detroit was definitely a major influence on me, but so was DJ Rashad, Jlin, RP Boo, Jana Rush... 21st Chicago...
As for the third album in this series, Orion, well, you’ll just have to hear it; I literally just finished it️.
This brings us to StarWaves. I have used this program exclusively to create the accompanying albums that I released on Mille Plateaux under the alias Count.0. To my ears, the first one of these albums, 0, was very synthetic, and the nature of the application I was using kept pushing me in that direction. I kept thinking that this sound was a by-product of the particular environment, so I ended up finding myself playing with the interaction of waveforms instead of creating compositional sounds. By the time I got around to the second accompanying album, no sum win, again, as Count.0, I was much more familiar with the application, and I had been feeding acoustic instruments and sample recordings into this environment (instead of relying on the synthesizers). I had some clarinets, some xylophones, kalimbas, a guitar, some Ghanian hand drum... I would play some melodies, for example, on these instruments, then start reworking them, re-constructing and de-constructing them in StarWaves. This is when I realised something—and you’ll have to take my word for this as an old, underground school techno-theorist—that StarWaves could just be understood as a “4D Sampler”, and the potential of that is huge. I know that the Doc is working on a version for the Apple Vision Pro, and there is already a version for the META Quest... Can you imagine the possibilities?
PS:
So, is that what you have been thinking about while making music most recently then? You went into cyberspace, visited several planets, and came back with a weird tech that you realised could be the brain of your techno methods. When we met in Graz, you did have this tendency to periodically vanish from the face of the Earth, only to calmly reappear later — I guess that’s where you were.
IAJ:
In a way, yes. In the case of the 3rd instalment of the Count.0 project, which will have the title Zero Days, and will be released around the same time as Orion... this third part has a completely different set of sound sources than the previous two, but again... No, I’ll leave it at that, just wait, it’s coming soon!
PS:
You mentioned that with this trilogy you have been working on with Mille Plateaux, you were looking at three distinct phases of both yourself and Techno music, and while you were not necessarily looking at it chronologi-cally, it certainly feels as though this final work, Orion, looks forward to the future: is this your vision of music in the future?
IAJ:
Wow, the future of music... who knows? It is something that I probably spent too much time avoiding, but let me put it this way: I make a fairly concerted effort to push my understanding of what I know about sound and music, personally, perpetually. It might not always be reflected in my releases, but I do care about this sense of learning and developing... but to speculate on music as a whole, especially at the moment, seems to draw me into a general speculation about, well, trends, and inevitably what comes with that is contemplating the machinations of “the market”. I wish I could talk about some alien AI inventing a new scale or something, but I can be quite cynical about this situation, though I sincerely hope that music becomes increasingly affordable and accessible, so that we can better create and share ideas, with hopes that different communities gain greater chance of having an input in society. When thinking specifically about music, however, I think that audio and visual will become even more intrinsically linked. For example, I think it is likely that there will always be people that want to own a physical material, like a record or a tape, but I also presume that in a not-so-distant-future, everything will be highly interactive and integrated that we won’t just be watching a music video on YouTube. Music videos will come with countless custom video options, or be integrated into online, AI powered 4D-art installations. All of these emergent situations will keep consumers well engaged.
I wouldn’t like to say that there isn’t going to be a huge amount of development in regards to ‘music itself’, but I do believe that a complete understanding of the nature of sound is about as likely as a complete understanding of the nature of reality; our understanding of music and sound will continually unfold forever.
As for AI, I think that as a tool it can be invaluable, especially when it comes to discovery and data assimilation, or imparting knowledge, but, like most things “creative”, there will always be “actors” that have no interest in “creativity”, but in commodities, and AI seems perfectly suited to enable that.
Eventually there will be some “hard” distinction, at least commercially, between AI creations, AI-assisted creations, and “handmade”,
but I do however fear that the particular idiosyncrasy or, say, the depth of human emotion, is probably not as broad as we like to believe, and like with image generations, as the machines learn what representations resonate best with humans, they will learn to tailor music to trigger an increasingly targeted range of emotional responses. In the future, outside of the commercial sphere, the “choice” between “enjoying” an entirely AI composition vs. an entirely “Human” composition may become a mere matter of personal taste, or even a matter of economy, rather than any kind of technical consideration regarding authenti-city of expression.
PS:
Well, I now just had a flash of a kind of dystopia where people from our economic background can’t afford to listen to music made by actual humans, we’ll just get “AI FM”. That being said, I would be willing to put in the archival work to assemble all the recordings of Ibrahim Alfa into one database for an AI to mix into infinity.
IAJ:
Haha, Well, good luck with that... There are moments where I think it would be helpful or interesting to get a vague idea of all the music that I’ve made in my life, but after a few minutes of scrolling through YouTube, I generally give up. Some of the music I made in the 90s seems like a million light-years away, but they’re still “a part of me”. I look back at them now, and I can hear what’s going on in the tracks, I can recognise certain developments or techniques. For example, certain sequencers seem to me to have left a clear signature on certain records, and the logic of these machines seemed to be more prevalent than say, what I was thinking or feeling while making them.
PS:
I guess that brings me to the last question really. What we didn’t know back in October was that you would be releasing an edition with us on ÊT/RE, what started as a proposal for some radio time turned into a tremendous act of generosity, as you came back to us with an album of serious sounds; we were really taken back. This collection, titled Centauri, which is scheduled for release on ÊT/RE around the end of Summer 2024 under your alias Alfa Electronics, how does this edition fit in with the other work you have going on. Besides the Mille Plateaux trilogy, you also run your own label Tsaigumi Records, which seems to release music as if you are live streaming it from your couch, as you said in the interview with Gui. What were you thinking about when you were putting together Centauri?
IAJ:
Well, it was great hanging out with you in Austria, and I had hoped that we would find a way to continue “collaborating” as I was very taken by the idea of Becoming and ÊT/RE, so when you asked if I would be interested in making a recording of some kind, I was excited... I had planned to make you a radio episode, but I just couldn’t find the “flow” that I was searching for with it... To be honest I had probably made 15+ different live sets/podcasts in the months leading up to meeting you and I was just struggling in that moment to find a pathway through the one-hour that I was happy with. So, I decided to break it down into a serialised format (singular tracks), then developing them each, expanding them and so on—this seemed to sit better with me, and it fits in perfectly with what I’ve been doing with Mille Plateaux, as a “Sputnik”️. As for Tsaigumi Records? It’s more of a random thing than a “label”, for example, I am the only artist, and all the aliases on there are me, I just pick a name based on how the day goes honestly. The music is, literally whatever I’m doing that can fit into the 4-track/8-track EP/LP trope. I just wait until I have a few tracks that share something between them, then release them together, so each new album is completely different to the previous. There are 32 releases online now.
PS:
That’s funny, I didn’t know they were all you. Let’s leave it there, with the image of a thousand Ibrahim clones: Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta… Phi, Chi, Psi, and Omega—CUT!