Music Pool Berlin Ambassadors #4 André Uhl

Welcome back to a new chapter of our Music Pool Berlin Ambassadors series, our features are dedicated to better explore the different aspects of the work that we do at our company. After reading about the experiences of Susanne Geisler, Martha Rose, and Mary Ocher, today we are meeting with composer Andrè Uhl to talk about his life in Berlin and how his participation in our workshops and community evening affected his work.

André Uhl is a musician, sound artist and futurist, born in Essen and based in Berlin. He merges noise and synthesizer lines converging them into dark, driving and cinematic pieces of music. His debut album ‘I hope the roof flies off, and I get sucked up into space’ was released in November 2017 on Neofakt, which is accompanied by a booklet of 13 short stories, each by a different writer. His single ‘New Oil’ has been selected for the Listen to Berlin 2018/19 compilation released by the Berlin Music Commission.

You define yourself as a “futurist”: what does the idea of future means to you?

To me, future is a projection surface for all things possible. All wishes, worries, desire, and fears connect me with the future. Within my academic work, I usually deal with future scenarios on a rather rational level. Music, by contrast, is my medium to express fear and desire on an emotional level. This exchange between rational and emotional stimulation about the future is very interesting to me.  

How do you find living in Berlin as a musician?

Berlin is inspiring, home to a very interesting music scene especially in the electronic and experimental field, offering plenty of opportunities to perform and showcase your work. At the same time, it’s affordable to live and work here. You don’t have the insane money making pressure like in New York or London for example. The flipside is sometimes things are going a bit slow here which can be contagious. You have to have a good level of self-discipline in order to get stuff done.

You took part in some of the activities organized by Music Pool Berlin: can you tell us something about this experience?

I really think it is amazing that a thing like Music Pool Berlin even exists. I participated at a couple of Music Pool workshops and panels and all of them have been inspiring and helpful for me in one way or another and I’m still in touch with some of the teachers or the people I met there. It’s so cool there’s this opportunity to learn about all these topics that are important to musicians, especially when working mostly on a DIY basis.

What is the aspect of your life as a musician you struggle the most with?

Making enough money to live from your music is a kind of bleak but a real issue. Especially when you’re working in an experimental genre. Also, you have to be prepared for all the stuff you need to do for your music career besides actually making music. Booking, promo, marketing, maybe even design, you have to deal with a lot of things, if you want your work to be noticed.