Nein Rodere is the moniker of 37-year-old German musician and painter David Roeder. In his music, he mixes song fragments and sound art with lo-fi aesthetics. He plays in CD3 with Cooper Bowman and in the improvisational trio Primitive Structures and released on labels such as Horn of Plenty, Kashual Plastik and Altered States Tapes.
skug: You combine making music with being a visual artist. Do these two things influence each other?
David Roeder: They influence each other for sure. What they have in common is that I’m always investing a great deal of care in layering in order to create a texture that has a lived-in and radiant feel to it. The layering of the brushstrokes and washes, and that of the sound surfaces of the recordings – these are key aspects of my work. In the psychology of art, texture is often linked to touch, which is the first way we experience closeness and warmth with another person. It’s literally supposed to touch you, in a symbolic way that is. Another thing they have in common is that in most of my work I aim to achieve a sense of open-endedness that invites the audience to put various fragments, narratives, aesthetics and feelings together in their own way. This is not to be deliberately cryptic, it’s what I relate to when experiencing art myself. There’s a lot of arguments I could put forward for this kind of approach, but in the end it’s a very simple and intuitive feeling: I want to be taken into someone else’s world, contradictions, warts and weirdness and all. That’s also what I can offer I’d like to think.
What does your moniker Nein Rodere refer to?
»Rodere« is an anagram of my last name and as such less burdened with biography and harder to pin down geographically than »Roeder«. The »Nein« (German for »No«) is a way to avoid this idea of authenticity that haunts the perception of a lot of home recorded music. However, the first »No« is also the moment when a child makes the world aware of being an »I«, someone with an agency. So in the end, saying »no« is also a way of saying »This is me«. It’s a snake biting its own tail! Regardless of all this, I have a feeling the name will be done with at some point. It seems to have an expiration date.
Do you have a working process, a way of working that leads to new music?
The starting point is usually just a sound or a melody or phrase that catches my ear, and then I try and flesh that out to a state where it’s a little more substantial than a fleeting impression but also still fresh and spontaneous. I usually record whilst arranging the music and keep the first inspired takes of everything, working layer by layer. Then I remove everything that seems inessential, leaving little smudges and traces at times. Often, I have to resort to experiments and found sounds, because I know very little about notes. This whole process can be quite slow and it is challenging to get everything to come together as an arrangement. Jean Dubuffet said something along the lines of »a toast to the artists without talent«, because they must be inventive and courageous and that’s what makes their art so stubborn and powerful.
Since when do you do Nein Rodere?
It started in 2017. It was a difficult year, and I really needed a project, so I bullied my friend Michael into letting me open for Carla dal Forno and Ela Orleans, a show he was putting on in Glasgow. Carla was doing something at that time I was keen on trying as well, this tender balance between almost pop songs and more abstract pieces. Playing that show was a way to pressure myself into coming up with something that wouldn’t embarrass me. There are a lot of uneasy memories of that time, but I think on a musical level, it worked out.
Do you remember what your initial motivation was to start playing, recording and releasing music?
I had a sort of musical awakening listening to Swedish mall punk when I was around 12, and music has been crucial to my life ever since, often a safe space when the »real world« became too much. Naturally, I wanted to participate. Over the years, I’ve played in loads of bands that were mostly about spending time with friends, and it can really be such a lovely way to do that, being inventive together. Ambition and songwriting were usually afterthoughts, and when they came in, things often became less fun or the music a bit stale. With Nein Rodere it started feeling different, like the ambition wouldn’t damage the appeal of it, and doing it alone also helped keeping the vision pure. I released the first cassettes myself because I couldn’t think of anyone who would do that for me. When I do it now, it’s to have a quick turnover and to maintain complete creative control. With my two LPs I was lucky that Nick (Horn of Plenty) left all the artistic decisions to me, whilst he was handling everything else. To me that’s actually more enjoyable, working with a good label like Horn of Plenty. I don’t really enjoy cropping booklets and sending parcels, but sometimes it’s the only way, and one shouldn’t be above this kind of work, I think.
Your music reminds me of the late 1980s and early 1990s; UK stuff like The Shadow Ring or The Fall, US stuff like Sentridoh, NZ stuff such as releases on Flying Nun or The Dead C.
Oh, cheers! These are not my usual go-to references, except for Peter Jefferies who would fall under the NZ umbrella. But of course they are all interesting positions, and I can see where you are coming from. I guess most of these artists would go on to influence »newer« artists that I have studied more closely. The Fall would influence The Dead C who were an influence on Liz Harris whose more abstract work had quite the impact on me – in general the moment when a song dissolves into texture, which you have sort of played through in stages with the first few Dead C LPs. Graham Lambkin of the Shadow Ring was influential to Letha Rodman-Melchior, who proved to me that sound collage can be catchy. I’m really into the Shadow Ring compilation »Remains Changed«, but I only discovered that after I recorded most of the Nein Rodere stuff that’s out. Lou Barlow / Sentridoh has been interesting to me when he tried out stuff, like messing with recording techniques or the hip-hop adjacent things on the »Kids« soundtrack. That’s the one thing I’d like to add, that things like sampling and word flow have been important from the get-go, and of course some hip-hop artists have perfected these. One of my favourites, Ka, died unexpectedly recently, which is really sad. He is to East coast rap what Loren Connors is to solo guitar.
You live in Berlin. Are you originally from Berlin? Are you part of a Berlin art / music scene?
I am not a Berliner. I came here 2018 after long stints in Glasgow and Leipzig. Scenes and communities are important socially, but I feel ambivalent on how group think can influence artistic decisions and people’s idiosyncrasies when it comes to expressing themselves. In this way I don’t consider myself as part of a scene, and I don’t really hang out a lot either. Of course, there are like-minded folks who work away on music projects I can relate to, but that is more on a global level. There are people like Sofie Herner (Leda, Eternal Music Society, Enhet för fri Musik, Neutral etc.) in Malmö or Cooper Bowman (Troth, Th Blisks, Tsap etc.) in Tasmania who are putting their own spin on all sorts of DIY sounds. I recorded an album with Cooper recently (as CD3, it’s coming out early 2025) which also features Sofie on one song, so that’s a little scene we made for ourselves, I guess. This is not to say that Berlin doesn’t have a lot of some interesting artists around. There seems to be a fair bit of progressive jazz / improv stuff happening at KM28 for example. There’s the Trii-Universe around Max Stocklosa and there’s Frank, who runs Kashual Plastik, who is always working away facilitating stuff at the DIY / industrial / noise end of things. Frank and I also play in an improv trio together (Primitive Structures), so I guess this makes me part of some sort of Berlin scene after all.
