Co-founder of the cult experimental post-punk pioneers Tuxedomoon, Blaine L. Reininger talk to us for a highly informative and fun Zoom chat. Here is everything we talked about.
Thanks for meeting me here. To provide context for our readers, we first intended to do this in person on the night of your recent Berlin concert at Quasimodo, but after the concert, when I came up to you and said hi, you were a bit too tired to talk, so instead, we are at Zoom now.
Blaine L. Reininger: There’s not really much time to do anything at concerts. You can’t socialize much. I used to not come out after the show and just hide in the dressing room. But for the last few years, I actually come out. Well, it helps. I can sell more merchandise if I’m there. But I actually like to talk to people. It’s nice to hear what they have to say.
I could really tell people at your Berlin show had genuine vibes to them. It’s obvious that many are your fans. Hopefully, that was the vibe of your tour in general as well?
It was a good tour. Very good reception everywhere. We had a nice time. It was kind of tiring because we travelled on the train. It was exhausting to carry our equipment around all the time. But they were good shows. So, you live in Berlin?
Yeah, I’ve been here for seven months now. This is my first time living outside of my home country.
Do you speak German?
No.
These days, everybody speaks English anyway. You can get by without speaking German. Berlin certainly wasn’t that way in the past.
The thing is, I would love to improve my German, but Berlin is not a good city to practice that.
Yeah. Unless you’re talking to old people in a restaurant, or a taxi driver, or something like that. I studied German in university.
Yeah, you were speaking fluid German at your concert. I actually wanted to ask you, how many languages do you have in your repertoire right now?
I speak 7 languages.
Wow. Which ones?
I have English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Greek.
You’re in Athens right now, right?
Yes, I am. I’ve never been to Istanbul. I would love to go. We just never got a show there. I imagine there might be people who want to come to a show, but I’ve never been there.
You live very close to Turkey as well. Hopefully, an organiser will make it happen one day.
Yeah, I would really like to before it’s too late. I would like to have a Tuxedomoon show too. We never played there either. We never played in Turkey, in China, in South America, and in Africa. We played pretty much everywhere else, everywhere in Europe. And, well, I played in Venezuela and in Hong Kong, but Tuxedomoon never did.
You have been to -and also lived in- many cities. Is there any city that you feel doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves?
I don’t know. I lived in Brussels for almost 20 years. I used to hate it there. After I moved away and came back to visit and stayed for longer periods of time, I really liked it. It became a much more likeable city. I really enjoy going back there, and there’s always a lot going on. Of course, I still have friends there and it’s all very familiar to me. It might be the same with Athens. I mean, people are starting to discover Athens, but also the people that are coming love it to death. They’re smothering it. The tourists are coming and everything is turning to sh.t because of that. In the center, there used to be a lot of small businesses, there were a lot of fabric shops and people that made shoes and things like that. It had a very interesting character. Now that’s all pretty much gone. All these places, they turn into stupid tourist restaurants, they sell hamburgers and street food.
In Berlin, several clubs and art venues are set to be closed and they will instead be turned to working places. It’s a global capitalistic trend that demands you to work more and buy more instead of making way for smaller businesses or genuine artists. From where you stand in Athens, do you feel that this is also a trend happening there?
Yes, it was the same pattern, what happened in Athens. It happened much later than the pattern that happened in New York and then in San Francisco. It happens everywhere. Artists, actors, musicians, painters will move into a part of town because there’s a lot of space and because the rent is cheap. 20 to 30 years ago, people didn’t want to live in the city. They wanted to move out to the country and get away from the city. So the artists went to the centers. The centers got interesting again because of the artists, and that’s what happened all over the world, at least the Western world for sure, like in New York. Here, just 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, the center was full of actors and musicians and painters. Then these companies came in, big property owning companies from China. These groups of people came in and bought all the places and turned them into hotels, and everybody else had to leave. It seems like that’s a process that happens all the time. It’s interesting.
I don’t know if you know William Gibson, the science fiction writer.
Yeah, the one who wrote Neuromancer, right?
Yes. He has another book called Mona Lisa Overdrive, where he writes about this same phenomenon. There are characters in his books that follow these bohemian centers around, they’re looking to make money off it. You can buy everything and later you own everything when they gentrify it. So that’s that. The question is, where are people going to go? It’s the reverse situation of the 60s and 70s, when people move out to the suburbs. Now, the artists and people with less money are going to move out to the suburbs. I guess that’s what happened in America. Or they’re going to live in a tent under the bridge. I don’t know. We’ve entered a very cruel era in our history. It’s an era where people don’t care about anything. People don’t care about kindness or compassion. It’s a difficult time.
I don’t know if you know about this, but there was recently a giant earthquake that hit the South of Turkey which killed people. After the earthquake, the government officials sold tents to people who lost their homes, instead of providing free accommodation to the victims. It was one of the many insane inhumane things we witnessed in our recent history.
Yeah, mankind is being reduced to a very animalistic level. It’s a pity. I think a lot of the reason for this is a kind of materialism. Nobody believes in anything except trying to get as much pleasure out of life as possible, trying to have enough money to have enough pleasant experiences. Because they think that’s the point of being alive: owning a lot of things. Having a boat and going out on the Mediterranean, having a big house, a beautiful wife or a husband… The people that have become very materialistic more than ever. Even people who think they’re religious are materialistic as well. They don’t believe in anything except money. People have always complained about how materialistic the Western world is, but now it’s the whole world.
Considering how things are going lately, do you feel hopeful about the future, or are you in a more pessimistic mind state?
I can’t say that I’m pessimistic, because I know that mankind is, at the heart, open to becoming spiritually aware, connected to the universe and leaving this desire behind. I consider myself a Buddhist mostly. I believe that we are perfectible. It’s possible for us to reach some kind of perfection, but it’s not very widespread. I believe that at their core, even the worst person, even Donald Trump, all they’re trying to do is be happy, right? Someone like Trump gets satisfaction out of exercising power over other people and out of buying everything in the world and thinking he controls it all. That comes out of a desire to be happy. It’s just deluded. They’re blind, they’re ignorant, they don’t know what’s real. They’re lost. I feel sorry really for the people that are so lost in materialism that they’re willing to be cruel to other people. They’re willing to do terrible things in their quest to be happy.
They handle their quest to be happy in a loser and pathetic way.
Yes, and we are constantly bombarded with this idea that the more things we have, the happier we’re going to be. That’s false. I mean, I try to do what I can. The only thing that I feel capable of doing to make things better is in my art. I try to make my art from this kind of spiritual stance. I try to make myself better. I try to be a better human. I figured that if I try to see past my own ignorance and stupidity, the things that I learned will come out in my heart. I’m grateful when people actually hear what I’ve had to say, or they come up to me and say, “Oh, your music helped me when I was feeling sad or lost,” or “Your music made me feel better about my life.” And that’s all I could ever ask for, really.
When you first moved to Europe, was it scary for you that everything was so different and new? Was it a difficult adaptation process?
I don’t know about scary. The place that was scary for me was when I moved from my hometown in Colorado to San Francisco. It’s not really such a big city, but it does have its crime and violence and those kind of things that I only knew from television, all these TV shows that made you think the big city life is going to get you killed the minute you walked out your door. So I was afraid of everybody. I’m afraid of everything. Once a poodle barked at me and I was afraid. I was just saying, “Wow, you’re afraid of a poodle, what’s wrong with you?”
So when I moved to Brussels, It was not so much that I was afraid, it’s just that I didn’t understand why people did what they did, but also people in those days that ran everything were from a different view of the world. When we moved to Brussels in 1981, the people that controlled the world were people that grew up in World War 2. They were adults in World War 2 and they went through the war. The world view I came from was of a triumphant America, right? America had won the war. The American economy was the most prosperous in the world. So people came to expect certain things. They expected to have two cars. They expected to own a refrigerator. They expected to have endless hot water in their bathroom, and colored television. Then I got to Europe.
Europe at that time was at least 20 years behind the United States in those kinds of things. Europe seemed very primitive when I first went to Brussels. You didn’t have hot water all the time, the phone system was very backward, and the people were very conservative. I had come from San Francisco in the late 70s, which was very advanced, there were people there doing very, very strange things. That later turned into Silicon Valley, but there was a very big avant-garde art movement in San Francisco at the time. So when I got to Brussels, it just seemed old and stupid, you know? But the thing that happened is, those people that controlled the world at that time, they all died. They were old when I got there, maybe 50. And as time went on, they started to die off and the younger people moved into their place. The people that grew up in the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s were a lot more cosmopolitan and they were a lot more global in their cultural background.
A lot of people think that globalization is this terrible, unjust thing. But it also provides a very supercharged society that exposes people to all kinds of different influences that they never would have had. Look at Berlin. When we first went to Berlin, all there was to eat pork and hot dogs. Now, people there eat cuisine from all over the globe. That’s symptomatic of how the culture changed, because people also will listen to music and watch movies from all of those places. That kind of globalization actually made world culture more unified. It made people see different people as pretty much the same. You could identify with somebody from Ethiopia and realize they have the same concerns as you do. They want to eat, they want to live. A lot of people are against that, especially people in the current political climate. They don’t want to be open to the world. They want to feel superior. They want to control the world. They want to use people to make their lives better.
One thing that’s made my life better that people complain about all the time is the Internet. When I lived in Brussels in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t know what was going on in my own country. I couldn’t afford to call my mother, I couldn’t afford to call my friends. I had lost touch with a lot of my dear friends. Now, because of the Internet, I can send a message to a friend of mine in real time. I can talk to these people all the time, anytime, send them photos. I can see what’s going on in my country. I feel a lot less lonely and a lot less homesick because of modern communication.
I live in Greece now. When you first come here, you’d think, “OK, this is like any other European country.” It looks the same and they pretty much have the same kind of shoes, the same kind of clothing. But once you’re here, you realize that there are certain things in the culture that people take for granted which they assume to be basic reality. You then realize you have a different idea about what’s good to eat or whether you can eat with your mouth open, which they do here, which drives me f.cking insane, because you do not do that in the United States. These subtle differences become more evident after you spend time in the place. Another thing is, it has been good for me to realize that, as people from America or England, we tend to think that our culture is supreme. If you don’t like Bob Dylan, then you don’t have any culture. If you don’t like Shakespeare, if you don’t know about these things, then your culture is worthless and primitive and no good. But after living in these other countries, I realized how much that’s just not true, how everybody has their own cultural icons, their own artistic history. It broadened my viewpoint to live in other countries.
I know that you are a fan of science fiction. On Facebook, you post a lot of AI photos of yourself. The current AI age we live in feels very sci-fi, and has been widely debated on ethical grounds and beyond. Can you describe your general view on all that?
I like making AI images. I find some of those video clips that people make so psychedelic. I mean, they are so surreal and really strange. It’s as if the AI smokes DMT all the time. It is on another plane of reality. It comes up with these really wild images, these bizarre creatures walking around. And I love that. I’ve always loved that kind of thing. I have always used mathematical systems to write my music and my poetry. In the old times I had a writing system where I used dice. I actually used a Dungeons and Dragons dice, because they have 12 numbers. I would shake the dice and write down the word to make poetry.
I knew that John Cage had used I Ching to decide what to do with his compositions. I Ching would kind of direct him. The idea was that by using random processes in a certain way, you give the universe a role in your creative process. You let chance dictate what you’re going to do and say, because it helps you bypass your ego. I will always like these kinds of things. Lately I’ve been incorporating AI into my own composition in ways I don’t even fully fathom. It’s just the beginning, after all. I have used AI in one of my most recent compositions. I wanted some words and I had AI write words, you know, I said, write some words about this. They’re not really meant to be heard, these words. They just needed to fill a place, right? I got like an AI text reader to read them in a female voice. Then I could mess with that voice.
I think AI will empower us. I’m not one of those people that think it is a threat to the arts. I find it enormously liberating. Once we know how to use it, it would free our minds and our imaginations, to go places we’ve never been before. If the AI itself starts to write music or to make art, all the better. It’s going to be some kind of new thing that we never even thought of. And as I said, some of the AI images look like they’re in Ayahuasca. They’re in some other realm. That has to be exciting. The only thing is, of course, like everything new, it needs some time to fulfill its potential. Imagine the first guy that invented the wheel. He’s like, “It’s good. It helps me move heavy things around.” Then he could also pick up the wheel and beat his neighbor to death with it. Any new thing, you can use it in a stupid way. I’m sure people will write music using AI because then they don’t have to pay anybody to write music. They can put it out and play it in the clubs and even make completely synthetic singers. That’s another thing William Gibson talked about: He wrote a book called Idoru. There’s this famous rock star that falls in love with this synthetic Japanese pop singer. They marry each other, and she’s artificially intelligent. I see those things already happening. They’re using it in film and they’re using it for just greedy purposes. But I think in the hands of an intelligent and creative person, it could help you create things that have never been seen, that no one’s ever thought of. That’s why I’m the kind of person that would gravitate toward it and not away from it. I’ve always been a futurist.
Have you ever had an instance where you felt inspired by a dream in your compositions? And how is your dream life in general? Do you dream often?
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. My dream life is a big part of my creative process. In that show that you saw in Berlin, I did a song called “Japanese Dream”, and that song is about a dream I had in the 80s. It was a strange scene in a Japanese cemetery. I refer to my dreams all the time and keep a dream journal. I try to have lucid dreams. I try to stay conscious in my dreams and to influence and manipulate things, to change the flow of the dream. It’s not often that I realize, “Oh, I’m dreaming!” That doesn’t happen to me that much. But when problems arise in the dream, I tend to solve them. One thing I notice I do a lot is I make strange vehicles for myself like a mutated bicycle, or some kind of strange scooter or something. Or I’m getting on a train all the time, or I’m flying all the time.
I also see the dead a lot. My dead friends come to visit me. For instance, Peter Principlel, the bass player of Tuxedomoon who died in 2017, visits me in my dreams all the time. I once said, “Wow, you’re back!” and he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Are you going to be all right?” He said “Yeah!” We keep thinking he’s going to die again, but he keeps hanging on there, and he’s in a lot of the scenes. That happens with a lot of my dead friends, they come back. I say, “Oh, wow, where have you been?” They say, “I’ve been dead, you know!” (laughs)
Dreams are very important. That’s one thing I always liked about surrealism: Their intention was to study their dreaming mind. And I believe that’s only skimming the surface of what there is in the human consciousness. What we dream is only the top of it. ıf you keep going deeper and deeper within yourself, you eventually come to the place where you are God, you’re one with the universe. That’s the point of being alive. So I’ve always tried to use dream material in my writing.
That’s beautiful. You mentioned keeping dream journals. Do you have a specific discipline for that? Personally, I try to keep them, but forget what dream I had right after I wake up.
I’m not doing it as much as I did. I keep a little book by my bed. I’m an old man and I have to wake up a lot of times to pee. I’ll try and write down what I was dreaming about. I don’t get it all. It’s amazing how quickly they disappear. I’ll be having a very epic dream and, and I think I’ll never, ever forget this. Then I get up and get a drink of water and it’s just gone. But also in my dreams, I’ve been to places that don’t exist or that used to exist or places that have changed since the last time I was there. Then I go to that place and I say, “Oh, my God, this is what I saw in that dream!” This happened to me in some places in Brussels. Also in Brussels, I had these dreams about a water scene in the middle of Brussels. I would go there and say, “Wow, where was this?” Then I saw some paintings of the way the river used to be and before they buried the river. I said, “Well, that’s, that’s just like my dream!” How could I know that? It’s a phenomenon called jamais vu. You know deja vu, which means you’ve already made something. There’s another phenomenon called jamais vu where you’re somewhere that’s familiar, but you get the idea that you’ve never seen it before. It’s all new, it’s all different. That happens to me a lot.
Once I was riding my bicycle in my hometown and I was coming home, but suddenly, everything looked completely new. I said, “Wow, I have never seen this neighborhood before. Where the hell am I?” Then it came into focus. I said, “Oh, OK, I know now,” but for a while there, it was a completely different place, somewhere I’ve never been. That’s something interesting and strange.
Apart from music, you are doing some acting. Is there a specific director you would like to work with at some point? I am aware that David Haneke, the son of Michael Haneke, is in the current Tuxedomoon lineup, so maybe there will be a connection there with his father?
Not that guy. (both laugh) His films are too bleak.
I’m not a huge fan of his films either.
I have a certain amount of dialogue with some directors. I also know Yorgos Lanthimos reasonably well, but I don’t know. I mean, I’ve done quite a few movies since I lived in Greece. It’s something I can do, but it’s not something I like all that much. It’s a lot of work. It’s sometimes fun, and sometimes I have a hard time learning lines. I’m not good at that. Takes me a lot longer. I work with professional actors and they learn their lines in a matter of minutes and it takes me forever. I’m always the last one with the script. I’ve also worked quite a bit in the theatre as an actor and I’m always the last person to put down their pages.
You also have a strong tie with The Residents. Do you have a favorite album by them?
I don’t know all their albums that well. I like Eskimo. I like the songs that I knew when we were working with them. I didn’t follow them that much later on. I like their Elvis and Hank Williams covers. That was good.
They were kind of different from us. They were a lot funnier really, a lot more like comedy. They had a lot more American, postmodern take on things where you don’t take anything seriously. They had more in common with Devo than us. At the beginning, The Residents signed us because they thought we were doing something similar to what they did. They liked what we did artistically, so we moved in the same circles in San Francisco. I liked those guys a lot. They’re funny guys.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics -whether from Tuxedomoon or your solo work- would you like to see written on your stone?
Wow. I mean, there’s one song that you probably never heard. It’s just a short bit of that. At one point I say: “And thus it was that I learned / All things breathe / Like a brick wall in the sun / My long shadow on the earth.”
That sounds beautiful. Thanks for this talk Blaine.
Good to talk to you too. Maybe somebody will want me to play in Turkey.
You can check out Blaine L. Reininger’s Bandcamp profile here and Tuxedomoon’s official website here.
