Robbert Heijnen is the musical vertebrate of Psychick Warriors ov Gaia and eXquisite CORpsE. The following conversation demystifies the trajectory of Robbert’s own path of self discovery. Starting as a musician fascinated by improvisation, flow states, and the intersection of western and non-western rhythm. His more recent centre of interest lies in the quantum understanding of harmonic relationships in music theory, as a way of deciphering layers of evolution and the role of consciousness. He calls it the “Dance of Mind and Matter”.
“The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” (James Lovelock - Gaia, a new look at life on Earth, 1979)
EB: Can you explain the backstory behind Psychick Warriors ov Gaia. How did you meet and what music were you interested in?
RH: I met Reinier and Reinoud in Tilburg, an old textile city that had a large student influx coming from the university, conservatoire, art school and dance academy. In the post punk and new wave era, everybody I knew was playing in a band, whether they could play an instrument or even had an instrument. To begin with, it didn't matter. It was the do it yourself attitude. If you wanted to have fun, you had to organise the fun yourself. Since Tilburg isn't very big, you would run into the same people. So that's where we connected. I remember one time I was at a party, and I had compiled a cassette tape with experiments of electronic music that I had done with another friend. I took a chance and played the cassette at that party. Reinier and Reinoud were really interested, as they’d never heard this stuff before. So they invited me to come over to their place.
We were experimenting with oil drums, guitars, and modular synthesisers on Sunday afternoons. It was during a time where all the students had left Tilburg, so we could make as much noise in this basement as we liked. Over time our jams became more electronic as I bought a sampler and incorporated different samples, rhythms and loops. Soon after, house and techno from Chicago and New York came over, which was music we could actually connect to, and we got inspired to try our version.
We started getting invitations to play at alternative parties in derelict discarded factory places. We didn’t have any music out yet, so we compiled a cassette tape with examples of the music that we were going to play. That cassette tape ended up in Belgium at KK Records. They were really enthusiastic and wanted to release our first record and immediately organised a tour for us in North America. Reinoud was involved with Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. So they already had a network of people in Europe and we got some exposure through them.
I was interested in electronic music from the fifties and sixties, completely experimental (Pierre Henry, Henri Pousseur, François Bayle, Michel Redolfi), but also non western music from all over the place because with that you don't have a connection. With house and techno, you know where that's coming from…Chicago, Detroit, Kraftwerk, some British bands. Another element is the industrial scene, which is a big part of where Reinoud came from with Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. But with non western music you don't know their culture, you hear the music and that informs you about what might have been happening, and the purpose of the music. Humankind has been dancing and creating sounds to get into a different headspace for as long as they probably were making music. That's an interesting part that we now see happening in western culture.
Popular culture is pretty limited. Getting exposed to different cultures stimulates the imagination and creativity. None of us were actually musicians. We liked music. We liked to make sounds. You try stuff out, and then you explore a bit more. And that's sort of how we started.
EB: It's interesting because in the Netherlands there’s quite a large club community around psychedelic techno. And when you trace it back you get to Psychick Warriors of Gaia. As a group, were you quite unique in what you were making?
RH: Yeah. I remember Eric Cycle from Quazar wrote a review in a dance magazine about Exit 23. He recognised that it’s so different from anything that came out before. You have minimal, primal, tribal. In the Netherlands, we knew Terrace in Eindhoven releasing on Djax-Up-Beats but that was more techno. Then you had the people from the bunker in The Hague. They were just exploring whatever they could get out of a couple of machines. So the bunker stuff was, for me personally, the most interesting.
And then you had the scene in Amsterdam which was just a bit too polished. Like, okay. It's well thought out, but it misses some of the rawness that I appreciate as well. That's not what I think dance music should be about. It has to be in the flow. That was one of our hesitations to sign a record deal because when you play live, you feel the reaction of the audience and how you feel yourself. You have a few ingredients that you can work with, but you don't have to think about it. You just go with the flow, and if it crashes, then it crashes. But you'll get back into it really quickly. This is a feeling that you can never ever put on records. You can't capture that in a recording. Even a live recording is still missing the energy.
EB: You summarise your experience of making music as being present, in a flow state, and not focusing on a particular destination point. This reminds me of some things you shared with me prior to this conversation which were based around self discovery. Let’s diverge slightly…within those insights you said that music is your point of focus but even outside of the practice of music. What do you mean by this?
RH: Well, the feeling must have already been there that there was more to music than just entertainment, pleasant sounds or raw emotions. Debbie, my wife, came home one time from a course in which they explained a few theories using musical analogies, like octaves and intervals. Then she flippantly asked ‘how does music work?’ But, ‘how does music work?’ You can even question that by itself. Technically? Okay. There's a vibration going on, and they have a certain relationship to each other. But how does that work on us? And then I realised that, actually, music doesn't exist. There's no apparatus that can measure intervals. What you can do is take a recording and then analyse the different vibrations. Then you can confirm the relationship of these elements. But with us, it's instantaneous. If there's a chord or sonic change, we have an immediate reaction meaning this is something that is reciprocal. There's something in us already that has the same quality, the same intensities.
So then I started delving deeper and working with the numbers. There’s something called the standard model of particle physics (the periodic table of elements which would come later), which is a similar principle, but it's all based on the same relationships that we know of music. The big bang happened when these relationships reached a state of maximum potential where everything that was of fundamental nature had reached its conclusion. So the next step is for another system to get involved.
Richard Watson from the University of Southampton talks about octaves and how these different layers must be talking to each other. This sort of goes against what they call the neo-Darwinist view that it's all gradual, instead there are jumps in evolution. This is what the Yuga Cycle is about. Each Yuga Cycle is one of these layers getting sorted out. Once it's sorted out, the next Yuga Cycle starts, so it's a continuing story. It means that at the beginning, stuff was really simple, but it gets more and more complicated because more and more layers that have their own organisational principles get involved. More complicated, but more that's possible.
It's like the people from the bunker with 2 or 3 machines and that's all they have. They're really limited in what they can do, but still there's so much going on. So even within limitations, there are endless possibilities. I'm trying to understand how it relates to the practice of music: the vibrations within octaves have a layer that is a network of relationships that leads to the next layer.
EB: Can you give an example of how this looks in music making or machines, and the theory outside of music into the practice of music itself?
RH: The first layer is basically music itself, the soul level. Although, if you would follow the exact frequencies, this is where western music differs from non western music. In western music, we want all the intervals to be available. We’ve been discussing the way to tune instruments for 100s of years, and nobody has a solution because there is no definite solution. If you want something to sound pleasant in one way, you're having to give away some of the pleasantness in other intervals.
In western music they made a compromise. Instead of 1.5, they tuned it 1.49 or so, and then it fits. But in non western music, there’s a difference between theory and practice. In practice, you say, okay. This sounds good. I'm going with this. And that might be wrong to purists. But in China for example, they've culturally drawn the conclusion that you can't have all the intervals. You have to pick a few and work with those few. So that's where they have pentatonic scales and only pick five intervals which they can tune according to how they sound best. And then their expressions go more into modulating. For westerners this music can sound boring because there's no bombastic chord changes. In non western music they set a mood and stick with that mood. In India, you have morning ragas, afternoon ragas, evening ragas because they acknowledge that you go through different cycles, just like in your sleep. Your whole day follows a pattern of when you're waking up, becoming more alert, and calming down. In the western world everything is pure chaos, there’s no rhyme or reason.
The second layer gets involved to work with the first to accomplish the chemical elements), the intervals of the music that we know are present. In the second layer there are intervals that would be grinding to our ears. So the first interval in this second layer is sometimes called the most beautiful ugly sound, or the most ugly beautiful sounds. It's sort of when you shove a wooden chair over a wooden floor. If you would base the whole composition on those intervals in the second layer, it might be an interesting listen, but chances are you won't listen to it again for a long, long time.
EB: You’re saying that you had these influences from western music, like industrial and Chicago House, New York House, but also then from non western reference points, which I guess would have different tuning systems within the music.
RH: Most of them would be more rhythm based. What's different there is they're more lenient to where the one should be or would be in music. We want to be able to count along, 1234, 1234. In African music, there's the Ensemble National Des Percussions de Guinée which is all percussion based. It's absolutely mind boggling what happens, the different rhythms and the counter rhythms going on. The different time signatures and the whole flow of it is just beyond comprehension. You just have to give up and let it happen.
That’s where I think music becomes the most interesting, where we still have our mind involved in music appreciation. The more interesting stuff is when you let go and your mind gets bypassed. That’s what they call embodied mind as well. Your body is part of the psyche - your conscious and unconscious mind. The conscious part is tuned into the now, and the unconscious part would be in your body. In the context of music it's like finding patterns in your unconscious mind that will all of a sudden start to make sense to you. Instead of having this cloud of unconnected bits, now you know how it fits. And this might still happen outside of your own conscious, but it becomes part of you. An inexplicable change with no words to assign to it.
EB: This does resonate with me as being how I would define what psychedelic music is about. And I think a lot of people use psychedelic music as a term to describe or define a certain sound that pertains to LSD and psilocybin. But there's a deeper meaning to it. I would like to get your perspective on what psychedelic music means to you.
RH: I think some industrial music is psychedelic music. Maybe by brute force, by the sheer noise and complexity that you can't tune out. If you're there, there's no escape, then you become part of this music, and that's an experience that can be really impactful.
Maybe because I've had experiences where, actually, I was the sound. I knew what was coming next. It’s like I had it all figured out. I guess then you are really in the zone. That’s something I picked up from DJ Qbert from the amazing Invisibl Skratch Piklz. His way of scratching was so natural. There was such a flow to it. He explained that you have to get into the zone. The zone is where you shut off your mind and you become one with your environment. There is no separation. Right now, we feel separation; I'm here, you are there. But when you're in the zone, this doesn't exist anymore. You are the turntable. You are the music that you hear. You are everything. You still have full control of your body, but now it becomes like your mind is the embodied mind. It would be sort of like a meditative state as well.
EB: Yeah. I was gonna compare it to meditation as well. And to what extent do you feel like it's something that you practice versus something that spontaneously happens?
RH: Well, there might be people that are able to convey and teach this. They can guide people, but a lot of times, it's something that happens to you. And then you figure out, take certain steps, and then it becomes easier to get into that state. Forcing yourself never works. You have to create the right environment for yourself.
EB: Did this kind of research underpin any of Psychick Warriors of Gaia or Exquisite Corpse’s work? Or did this all come afterwards as a kind of post analysis or dissection of your musical background?
RH: Instead of doing the music and being busy with music, now I found another way of expression. I think they're still connected, it's just on a different plane. Say somebody is creative but doesn't have the access to anything that they would like to be creative with. They will probably find something to be creative with, because it's that urge to be creative that's the most important. Presently, I guess with this research into self discovery.
EB: Was that a reason that you left PWOG, partly due to you feeling like you had a unique path of self discovery?
RH: Yeah. I probably wouldn't have been able to express it at that moment. It's just a gut feeling. When I'm by myself, I can go wherever I want to go. I do acknowledge that the music of the Warriors is way more mature. I don't know if that's the right word. Way more formed, because more people were involved. I think Exquisite Corpse is almost silly sometimes, but that's part of me as well. I love to be silly and childlike, and I guess that's where I find inspiration as well.
You have to let go. And maybe that was part of the Warriors that I found off-putting. There was too much of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. You can get inspired by it, but there was too much going to the front that was a bit problematic to me. I can find myself in a lot of different ideologies, but I'm not going to be an advocate for any of them because I want to be independent.
EB: From my understanding, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth was quite cult-like and almost lent into an indoctrination of some kind.
RH: Yeah. It might have served a purpose for anybody involved, but that was my feeling as well. It's one dogma replacing other dogmas. Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth was an international network of like-minded people that were exploring and then eventually doing self discovery. But I think self discovery you do on your own terms and not somebody else's terms. Once you subscribe to an organisation, then that's it. Federico Faggin’s book Irreducible touches upon the idea of a “classical world”, the one we share with each other, and the “quantum world”, which is our own private inner world, that more often than not cannot be expressed or shared with others. This inner quantum world is where “the work on self” is being done, through feedback with the soul. Anything created in the outer, shared world would then be a means to alleviate the mind from having to keep track of too many things at the same time, and/or become a tool for continuing the process of uncovering. And of course these means and tools are up for changes.
Doing something on someone else's terms is not what punk was about. It was about anarchy. We’re all different. And that's actually what this is about: taoism. There's a book called Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, and the first sentence says, ‘the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao’. There is no one method. Each of us has to figure out what works because we are all solving the same puzzle, But each of us has a different idea of what is finished that we're trying to fill in the blanks.
You inherit these puzzles and you start figuring out stuff differently. That's probably what transpires in society, how we interact on different levels, economic, social, cultural. Until there's enough solved that we can move on and or maybe make it even more complicated. That's part of the yuga cycle as well. The last cycle is the Kali Yuga, which is total chaos. But in the total mayhem there is the finished puzzle. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't belong, and the completed puzzle would be the stage of maximum potential. Everything else that's floating around is part of the system but not part of this stage of maximum potential.
EB: Quite a lot of the time when I speak to artists that were making music in the early nineties, or late eighties they connect to the socio-political conditions of what was going on at that time, or it seemed very grounded in that moment in a subculture. The way I've listened to you speak about your time spent with the Warriors or as Exquisite Corpse is that it's not necessarily grounded in a certain place and time. It feels like it's quite transient but ephemeral.
RH: Yeah. It definitely was not a reaction as in a protest. Of course, we were informed and probably shaped by our surroundings. I know in the UK shit went down, and I guess this was a gift to the youth to dance away whatever they were facing. This was a moment where they could do something really simple that would still be an act of defiance, especially with all the illegal raves going on. That must have been such an exciting period of time. But in the Netherlands that wasn't really the case. It was about partying on your own terms and your own environment. Take North America for example, the music went through over the Atlantic to Europe and then sort of got reformulated and then sent back over to the white audience in the US. It was basically black and Latino people that were into house and techno at the beginning, but now it got repackaged. Then, the rest of the youth of America joined in.
The West Coast USA had its own background in hippiedom which was made up of individuals, scientists, and groups of people trying to uncover something that felt like a shimmering, almost palpable, energy that was beyond proper description and definition. For example, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and James Gleick’s Chaos (Making a New Science).
There are things called attractors in chaos theory, where the system that might look like chaos converges around a single attractor and then makes a phase transition. The phase transitions are actually the Yuga Cycle. Terrence McKenna foresaw that there would be one attractor at the end of this whole process where all differences that are the force fields get resolved. Once you reach that point (which is when that puzzle gets solved) you realise that this was just a show. It was a theatre to make you get to that point. And now you've experienced this whole trajectory, and now you understand what it actually means. This is the continuity of the beatniks into the hippies. And even before the beatniks there were maybe movements in the more esoteric subcultures. The world wars threw a wrench into the traceability of the theory of consciousness, so there’s this big gap that happened.
EB: How far can you date back consciousness?
RH: Around 40,000 years ago. That was when the first cave paintings, petroglyphs, were made. So they figured that was the first time homo sapiens started to become aware of themselves.
EB: And interestingly, that self awareness is practiced through the medium of art because they're paintings.
RH: Totally. But we can't imagine what they thought at that moment. They might have figured that they could influence themselves and their surroundings, and they might have already included psychedelics. Joseph Nechvatal who wrote about the caves in Lascaux, France (Immersion Into Noise) argued that there would have been caves that were known to these people that would be way more accessible and way more conducive to leave these prints in. But he argued that it's actually the acoustics of the cave that made them decide to go for that one. It's quite a long path to get to the paintings. So he figured music or sounds would have played a major role there. These paintings were probably applied while being under the influence.
EB: I see quite a lot of symbolism or reference points to indigenous populations, or maybe Native American reference points in the design. What was the intention behind using those reference points?
RH: I have a feeling that they knew that sounds and music and dancing would be a means to communicate something that goes beyond logic, beyond regular communication. One of my heroes is Gregory Bateson. He’s an anthropologist who studied in Papua New Guinea and in Bali. Papua Guinea sort of didn't give him access. They wouldn’t allow him to participate or be around certain ritual periods. And then he went to Bali where they were more receptive to his presence. And he figured that the rituals that they had were basically to resolve any problems that they were facing, instead of having lengthy discussions and blaming others. So now there's music and dance. And the problems within the community were resolved through this. There are similar practices in Morocco with Gnawa music. So people go there to heal.
When you grow up in that tradition and there is a ceremony with that music and you can dance yourself into trance, you have access to stuff that you otherwise don't have access to. Whatever causes any stress or blockages within you, you can all of a sudden dissolve. Science will never have access to that because it's outside of the material realm. Science will never really find an answer there because it's outside of the realm of matter.
EB: I like the way that you can explain music so deeply through science but then in the end it can't answer everything and there's so many inexplicable things about music.
RH: Maybe the music of The Warriors and Exquisite Corpse were infantile attempts at mimicking or trying to get something going in a similar vein. It should be playful, not too serious. And if anybody comes to a concert of mine and has a great time without any further implications, that's totally fine. Some people come fully loaded with expectations, and they want to project whatever expectations they have onto the situation but I think it's a bit of a waste. You have to just take it as it is.
Reading list:
The Self Organizing Universe by Erich Jantsch
Steps To An Ecology Of Mind by Gregory Bateson
Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead
Gaia, a new look at life on Earth by James Lovelock
Irreversible by Federico Faggin
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela