Being Here
An interview with Markus Lucier on his musical output: Duka Words II - Moving Out
Words by Bert Geelink (Musicola Magazine, Benelux)
There’s this beautiful apartment-building, situated just five minutes from where I used to live. Getting there is easy: when you walk along the northern part of The Hague’s Reinkenstraat you eventually run into a life-sized statue of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelick playing a harpsichord. Taking a sharp left, tracing the street that carries the 17th-century composer’s name and following the right-sided sidewalk, you’ll find the beautiful house I’m talking about. Its walls are covered with Virginia creeper and the wooden door is painted dark-red, which sharply contrasts the creeper’s mint-green leaves. We always used to wonder who lived in this odd, out-of-place building that suddenly rises up amidst all these solemn ‘herenhuizen’.
Today I found out that this is the place Markus Lucier decided to rent just two years ago. Markus moved to the city of The Hague a couple years back and got involved with the flourishing music scene in the city of The Hague. Being a classically trained guitarist, Markus has been a driving force in performing Maria Afonso’s compositions and currently works and lives together with the Belgian composer/pianist Suzanne Peeters. Via some mutual friends I learned about Lucier’s latest work ‘Moving Out’: a sparse and pleasantly ‘snuggy’ record that felt like a warm wintercoat worn during a cold, dreary December morning. Markus’s latest - only fifteen-minutes long - album has been released in 2019, presenting one of his current aliases: Duka Words II.
Crossing the threshold of the creeper-covered house, I entered the wonderful world of Markus Lucier. Like the vines draping down the house’s facade, the interior of Markus’s corridor is covered with images of sunsets and sunrises; sandy beaches and quiet dunes; black and white images of what looks like Southern American coasts. One of these images I’ve seen before: it’s the sunset parading on Markus’s latest musical release ‘Moving Out’.
I do know that sunset! That’s the album-cover, right?
Haha, you’re right, you’re totally right. That COULD have been it. Funny that you recognize it, because the image I eventually decided to use is not this specific shot. See? [pointing at the bottom right of the image] The couple’s not in this image.
I see…
A lot of people get mixed up [chuckles]. The images are shot only about thirty seconds from each other. I love it. A friend of mine, Anna Klevan, once had this beautiful project about sunsets, trying to capture as many of them as she could: sunsets on camera; sunsets described via text messages; sunsets described on phones, on Youtube; sunsets in songs. It was really beautiful. She ended up setting up some sort of phone-service you could call and the voicemail would describe to you a full sunset. This image kind of reminds me of that project…
And the album-artwork is shifted sideways too, right?
Yes, yes! I just loved the lines the setting sun makes on the rippling water when turned sideways. I think it was Suzanne’s idea, haha. Rotating [the image] kind of made the setting sun feel like this infinite moment, you know?. Somehow it feels like you first have to rotate the image before the sun can actually set behind the horizon. It’s kind of floating now, see? [Markus picks up the image and turns it sideways]
Haha, I think I get it. And all these other sunsets? It seems like a theme?
I don’t know, I like them and my wife loves them. We kind of collect these images. Thrift-stores, friends of ours gift them all the time. This one here we actually just got from our friend [Markus points at a bright sunset, behind some mountains] who also gave me the field recordings I used on the Duka Words record. I don’t know, they kind of feel related. Some crickets... some mountains. I don’t know, haha.
Philip?
Yes, Philip [Caron] got this picture somewhere in Canada I believe. It’s beautiful. All of [the pictures] are beautiful, but there’s a little too many of them [chuckles].
Making our way into Markus’s living room, there was just so much to be seen. Trinkets everywhere; more images of mountainous terrain and sunsets. Beaches. Along the walls there’s loads and loads of records. There’s MF DOOM, Andriessen, Frederique Masquet, Gesualdo and Bach Cantatas. Coffee’s ready so we decide to sit around the mahogany-wooden table. Jokingly, Markus puts on Bach’s Coffee Cantata. The log table we sit at looks and smells newly cut.
[As I knock on the table] is it new?
Nah. It’s actually one of the thing’s I still got from moving to The Hague. It was so funny moving it from my old place to the small Dutch apartment I found. Ridiculous.
Because you moved from..
I moved from Nancy [red: France] to The Hague in January 2018. I just kind of lost my job at EMAN [red: Ecole des Musiques Actuelles de Nancy] as a guitar-teacher and Maria [red: Afonso] offered me a temporary job performing some of her latest works. So I decided to move... I was kind of ready to move out from Nancy for a long time anyway and it seemed like the right moment. Everything kind of worked out.
So about that… the record’s information suggest you got kicked out of your old apartment, right? This sounds a little different…
[Chuckles] Ah yes, the apartment at Rue de la Miséricorde, haha. Well that’s a little story. I exaggerated a bit ok, I don’t know. Those times are not the best to remember. Let’s say they didn’t really like it when I didn’t pay rent for a while. I was moving anyway. See, Nancy’s a town like that, haha. I remember the landlord died that period and we got along well. I don’t know if his kids wanted to sell the apartment like the the album suggests, but I surely know they wanted me out of there, haha. What a place… It was wild.
The name you used to release the music is Duka Words II, why did you decide to use a different name? You’ve never released any work as Markus Lucier or anything?
Well… that kind of came naturally I guess. Maybe in the near future I’ll release something physical that carries my personal name, but I feel this Duka Words thing kind of felt like something small, something personal but small. Like a really, really small picture you once took and when you look at it, you can barely see what it’s supposed to have captured, but the memories just keep flooding because there’s just something about the picture, something real but not there. I think I just wanted to make something real quick and small, just a couple of chords I really liked and then add some lush pads and dubs. I’ve composed before, but to make it sound simple and fresh is sometimes so hard. I wanted to make it feel like how I remember the rooms in that old apartment, you know? I just wanted the little picture to be simple and clear, just to remember it - nothing more. Maria lent me her old recorder that has this little fuzz in it. I loved it and it made everything feel so small [Markus pinches his fingers together]
‘Moving Out’ is definitely small: it only spans like, fifteen minutes? When I listen to it, I mostly wish it was longer. Have you considered adding some tracks?
I remember Maria once said something like ‘who needs a ten-minute song if we can’t even normally remember seven chunks of information’, something like that, I have to ask Maria about that quote [chuckles]. I don’t know. There’s enough information to dive a little bit deeper, fifteen minutes seem short but sometimes you need to clean your ears and play it again and again and then clean your ears again and press play again. It’s a great exercise to listen to something simple on repeat and kind of meditate on what the sounds mean. I remember this video of Cage sitting on a pile of trash, performing his 3:44 piece and it’s just so sincere and funny at the same time. I often feel like that when listen to Arthur Russell’s instrumentals. Cage didn’t like recorded music, but I love it. To think you listen to the same track when you press play again is just a misunderstanding.
Do you consider the Duka Words II moniker classical?
No. I don’t even know what you mean with that word classical. No. All these horrible distinctions of sound are just made for people to feel good about themselves, haha. Being part of some lineair story. This year I heard the Dutch make a top 2000 every year of songs they like the best, kind of making this ridiculous canon of pop-songs. I rather not care too much about the canon and start working on today’s sounds that fade away the way I like them to fade, haha.
But the images seem to be kind of fixed, right?
Well, they’re tiny tiny memories of rooms I have mostly forgotten about myself. I was reading this book by Perec... I forgot the name, something d’Espaces [red: Espèces d’espaces] describing these rooms and their function. I got the name ‘Moving Out’ from the book too! Everything kind of got together. I love Perec and got completely lost in La Vie mode d’emploi when I was studying. Perec always reminds me that the book and real life complement each other in some crazy way. I wish music could be like that, but it’s hard to really separate sound from the moment it rings. I know the people living in La Vie mode d'emploi are still living there in some way. Perec always seems to extend reality a little bit, making some room for unreal real things. You mentioned this was for a magazine about the entrance, yes?
Well, yes I’m interviewing you because of the first edition of //\ hoekhuis magazine and the name of the first edition is all about entrances and the magazine’s editors really liked your song…
Beautiful! Beautiful! Well it has this funny melody that walks down and up, and it’s kind of like the stairs in the apartment building. The synthesizer is this Triton by Korg. It’s such a heavy synthesizer, for real. I can’t carry it, haha. And the field recordings are actually recorded in Nancy. Little birds at Place Charles III. I remember I had coffee with my friend Sophie, just around the corner where she worked, I think she worked at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy. And there were this cute birds singing on top of the golden fence and the fountain. It was just around the corner of my house, so there’s these warm memories of being there. I don’t know. I miss Nancy sometimes. I like The Hague and my friends here, but you know. I miss speaking French and my English is so so [chuckles].
Your English is close to perfect! Though you do have a little bit of a French accent …
Haha, French accènt, ja ja [chuckles]. The Dutch are just so good in English. I’ll never learn how to speak Dutch. Suzanne of course speaks Dutch, but we mostly talk in English. I think I even speak a little French in my guitar playing, sometimes. A little bit like Lully and his French composing-style. I like to put ornaments in my melodies to kind of make the composition dance. I still have some students in The Hague and when they copy my notes and try to make things pretty I always have to laugh. The Dutch are very good at copying. It makes them very friendly, but it’s also a little silly sometimes, haha.
I think we are like little mirrors: really good at reflecting images that people try to project upon us. I think it’s a left-over of trading too much.
Could be, could be. I like the Dutch. Me and Suzanne sometimes make French jokes about the Dutch. The French always make a lot of jokes about the Dutch. The Dutch are very funny to make jokes about, haha. Sometimes I laugh about their funny accents, and then I remember mine. Haha.
Is there anything you’ve been working on lately? Any future releases you’d like to share?
Haha, these last seven months have been really awful for me. I’m really glad about the social support I got from the Dutch government, but I’m really looking forward to performing again after this Covid-19 period is over. We did go into the studio last month to record Maria’s record and it would be amazing to perform this in 2021. But we’ll see. Suzanne’s always working on new material and I’ll make sure she’ll involve me in some way [chuckles]. I think she’s currently talking with Smikkelbaard [red: record label] about a new release. We need Marcel to act a little bit quicker. No, I’m kidding, everybody loves Marcel!
