Sidewinder

Inside the mind of a serial collaborator Tim Motzer

by A.D. Amorosi

published Nov 1, 2006

Collaboration's a powerful drug.

Tim Motzer is hooked. Check his credits.

The guitarist/producer has paired with soul men (Kenny Lattimore), avant gods (David Sylvian), house heads (4 Hero) and Afro poppers (Les Nubians). He's done hip-hop with the Roots, fusion with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and krautrock with Can's Jaki Liebezeit.

He's conspired so closely, and so often, with fellow Philly dogs Ursula Rucker and King Britt on so many recordings in so many ways it's hard to pin down who Tim Motzer really is. Even CP came up with a blurry image of him with Britt when we praised their Sister Gertrude Morgan collaboration on our cover. "I was having a bad hair day anyway," says Motzer

Motzer's got his own projects, too: Global Illage, Fractal Ark, Jazzheads and the poetry-infused Secret Voices. So when and where is Motzer most alive? Working on someone else's music or his own?

He'd rather play than talk about it. "I'm just in it, you know — doing it," says Motzer. But he's not just another session guy. "Ultimately whatever I'm involved in gets a big dose of whatever 'my thing' is. I mean, I've had a blast with solo ambient stuff like Tilomo. But I dig working with others because of the give and take of ideas."

It's not like Motzer hasn't been working on what King Britt told me was a Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie-like solo CD — for nearly three years. "I'll have a record with my voice under my own name soon," says Motzer. Till then, there's a teaser called "Starship" on his MySpace page.

"Everything I do has its own identity. They're their own universe." When a true collaboration comes, Motzer gets crazy stimulated. "What occurs is not necessarily about the artist, but a final outcome," he says. "The art itself goes to a higher place." He pauses. "Well, we hope so anyway."

Motzer's a serious dude.

As a producer, he'd rather catch the moment and find nuance as opposed to perfection. An improvisation-minded player, Motzer wants to take the listener where there's depth and soul. The Hamilton, Ohio-born composer, whose mom sang in big bands, is the type of guy who talks about Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson.

He got to be best friends with Barry Meehan — his closest collaborator in Fractal Ark and Global Illage — because Motzer had a jam party and Meehan introduced himself by sitting in on bass pedals. A bass-pedal party. That's his brand of fun.

That's pretty much how Motzer befriended Britt, by playing guitar at a Back2Basics party at Silk City in 1995. "There's a special chemistry when we work together," says Motzer. It was Britt's enthusiasm for Motzer's solo album (Soft Lunch, under the pseudonym Tilomo) that encouraged him push it into release. Motzer meant for it to be chill-out music, but it's a more emotional and complex. "It takes you somewhere. Just don't drive or operate farm machinery while listening to it," he says jokingly. There's a palpable sense of isolation to all that Motzer touches — passionate, but distanced.

His new record, Secret Voices' No Time for Silence, is mournful. "I find it easier to write with the feel of the dark than the happy," says Motzer. "I suspect it's a reflection of having to travel so much." Most of No Time for Silence was recorded in Italy and Spain.

With Meehan creating bass loops and Italian co-composer Enrico Marani applying layers of drones, No Time for Silence allowed Motzer to add his own loops, drums and layers at will. He was casually planning on adding a few voices. Nothing much. Until, again, the project became about something and someone else. "It evolved slowly into having poets from different cities around the globe collaborate," he says.

Along with Italian and Portuguese poets — Adriano Englebrecht, Benedicte De Dorlodot — the contributions of Philly's Ursula Rucker, Elliott Levin and Rich Medina helped contextualize the work. "Their contributions put everything in perspective ... a totally natural part of framing out the work." Suddenly, Motzer goes into overdrive, talking about how Rucker's poem deals with childhood innocence and hate ("so beautiful and melancholy") and how Medina improv'd his way through an allegorical work about the war in Iraq and how Levin's "To Be Perfectly ... Frank" was an epic. "It was stellar as it went down in the studio — his three-dimensional poem, his beautiful harmolodic saxophone multitracking. All 19 minutes of him, it's definitely something to hear."

In his enthusiasm for other people's contributions to No Time for Silence, Motzer nearly forgot that it was his record we were talking about, not Levin's or Rucker's. "I think my identity may get lost in these actual projects," he says. "That's my challenge in the coming years — to get out of the shadows."

BURNT FRIEDMAN + JAKI LIEBEZIET - SECRET RHYTHMS 3 (NONPLACE)

 

RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 26, 2008 THE NEW ALBUM AND EP FROM BURNT FRIEDMAN AND JAKI LIEBEZIET - SECRET RHYTHMS 3 (NONPLACE) FEATURING TIM MOTZER, HAYDEN CHISHOLM, AND JOSEPH SUCHY. NONPLACE.DE 

Following a concert they gave together, Tim Motzer joined Friedman and Liebezeit in the studio and crucially influenced 3 album titles. Motzer already appeared on the predecessor CD (Secret Rhythms 2, non19) and also provided guitar accompaniment to Friedman’s contributions to the Nine Horses (with David Sylvian and Steve Jansen, samadhisound). Originating from the Philadelphia Jazz scene, the guitarist’s activities include a creative partnership with Ursula Rucker and King Britt. It is Motzer’s acoustic guitar that links up with the 2005 vinyl EP (Out In The Sticks, non17), on which Motzer likewise played an important role. 
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"It's not important, but i like it if people dance to the music," said Jaki Liebezeit in a recent interview. "Sometimes it happens." The drummer is likely to get his wish with Secret Rhythms 3, his third collaboration with Cologne's dub deconstructionist Burnt Friedman. The album, their most muscular so far, is a study in music as movement. Liebeziet's drumming sets the pace on every song, and the duo's collaborators - improvising guitarist Joseph Suchy, Philadelphia's jazz- and soul-schooled guitarist Tim Motzer and Root 70 reedman Hayden Chisholm - fold themselves into the mix like tendons and sinews. Some of that is no doubt due to Friedman's touch as a producer. The studio remains one of his principle instruments, and his mixing helps to smear disparate contributions into a blurry totality. But these seven songs also sound as live as anything Friedman has done, less the product of clever studio constructions than of a real-time mind meld. the album's sheer physicality is helped by the fact that many of these rhythms do indeed seem to harbour secrets. Try as I might to count out the time signatures to "Morning has Broken', I fail, and yet nothing sounds 'difficult' here. Their loping pulses may be riddled with kinks and strange switchbacks, but they keep coursing forward, carrying the listener with them. Although melody takes a third place to rhythm and timbre, riffs and pointillistic daubs of colour create an expressive sensibility that's often lost in rigorously repetitive music. The album's most bruising song, "Entsafter", presents all the contradictions that makes the collective's music so exciting, somehow managing to squeeze grinding, 5/4 guitar strumming into the rigid, 4/4 grid of rock and dance music. Over the course of eight minutes, scabby electric guitar riffs and and unflinching keyboard ostinato whip themselves into a frenzy, and it's not difficult to imagine even a fairly conventional DJ using the track as the climax of a club set. That Friedman, Liebezeit and their colleagues are capable of sneaking their secret rhythms into even the most hidebound contexts only confirms the power of their beguiling approach to pulse. 
Philip Sherburne The Wire (uk) October 200